Forer (or Barnum) effect

William P. Wattles, Ph.D.

Francis Marion University

• A psychological phenomenon in which people tend to ignore inaccurate assessments of their personality while interpreting general claims to be true.

• The Forer or Barnum effect is also known as the subjective validation effect or the personal validation effect.

• http://www.theness.com/encyc/forerefect-encyc.html

• Unconsciously, people tend to force-fit generalizations about their character into the way they view themselves or would like to view themselves

• Forer gave a personality test to his students, ignored their answers, and gave each student the above evaluation. He asked them to evaluate the evaluation from 0 to 5, with "5" meaning the recipient felt the evaluation was an "excellent" assessment and "4" meaning the assessment was "good."

• The class average evaluation was 4.26. That was in 1948. The test has been repeated hundreds of time with psychology students and the average is still around 4.2.

ADHD.com

Astrology

• the positions and movements of celestial bodies (stars, planets, sun, and moon) at the time of birth profoundly influence a person's life.

Biorhythms

• theory that claims our daily lives are significantly affected by rhythmic cycles

Confirmation bias

• Confirmation bias refers to a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one's beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one's beliefs

Selective thinking

• Selective thinking is the process whereby one selects out favorable evidence for remembrance and focus, while ignoring unfavorable evidence for a belief.

Communal reinforcement

• Communal reinforcement is the process by which a claim becomes a strong belief through repeated assertion by members of a community.

• Examples abound: alien abductions, astral projections, that you can rid yourself of cancer by visualization or humor.

Testimonials

• Testimonials and vivid anecdotes are one of the most popular and convincing forms of "evidence" presented for beliefs in the transcendent, paranormal and pseudoscientific.

Explanations

• The most common explanations given to account for the Forer effect are in terms of hope, wishful thinking, vanity and the tendency to try to make sense out of experience

• People tend to accept claims about themselves in proportion to their desire that the claims be true rather than in proportion to the empirical accuracy of the claims as measured by some non-subjective standard.

• We tend to accept questionable, even false statements about ourselves, if we deem them positive or flattering enough.

• Many such subjects often feel their counselors have provided them with profound and personal information. Such subjective validation, however, is of little scientific value.